SOSUAS: Stability Optimized Swarming for Unmanned Aerial Systems
Student Contest:
No
Affiliation Type:
Academia
Keywords:
UAV, UAS, Swarm, Positioning, Optimization, Communications. Modeling and Simulation
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have unprecedented potential in various fields from surveillance to packet delivery. The swarms formed by multiple UAVs increase the number of potential UAV applications as they can be utilized for complicated tasks. Therefore, various swarming methodologies are proposed to coordinate the UAV positions in swarms. Virtual forces and molecular geometry based approaches have been instrumental in UAS swarming applications. These approaches apply forces between UAV nodes similar to electron pairs for near-ideal volume coverage. However, the ratio of these forces and the stability of the node positions in the network have been critical challenges. In this paper, we propose an approach to optimize the virtual forces for a realistic communications environment. The extensive simulation results show that the approach can identify the relationship among the attractive and repulsive virtual forces for given positional properties of a UAV swarm.
